Tom Brown Ministries was listed on Thursday as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights organization that tracks such activities.

Bishop Tom Brown said it was unfair to associate his group with the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations just because it fought city health benefits for gay and unmarried city employees. Brown was ordained a bishop on Wednesday by an Episcopal group that broke away from the American church in opposition to the ordination of gay bishops.

"Hate really ruins what God wants you to be," Brown said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in Montgomery, Ala., in 1971 by civil-rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. The group says it has sought to consolidate the gains of the civil-rights movement -- often by suing racist groups.

The center also has taken up the cause of gay rights.

"Opposition to equal rights for gays and lesbians has been a central theme of Christian Right organizing and fundraising for the past three decades -- a period that parallels the fundamentalist movement's rise to political power," it says on its website. "For Christian Right leaders, the gay rights movement and its so-called 'homosexual agenda' are the prime culprits in the destruction of American society and culture."

Brown helped form El Pasoans for Traditional Family Values, a political group that led a successful ballot initiative on Nov.

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2, 2010, that ended health benefits for 19 domestic partners of city employees -- of whom two reportedly were members of gay couples.

When Mayor John Cook and city Reps. Susie Byrd and Steve Ortega voted to restore the benefits the following June, Brown and others led a movement to recall them from office.

That led to a bitter court fight, with the state 8th Court of Appeals ruling last month that the recall group broke the law in its recall drive, and ordering that an election scheduled for April be canceled.

Throughout the battle, Brown has insisted that he's not a hater.

"I don't even hate the mayor," he said jokingly on Friday.

Brown was especially outraged to be added to a list of groups that include the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., which the Southern Poverty Law Center says is "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America."

The church is known for its harsh anti-gay beliefs and the crude signs its members carry at their frequent protests, the center said.

Brown said that when the group was reported to be planning a trip to El Paso in October to protest at a soldier's funeral, "I came out as one of the first ministers against their actions."

And, with a highly diverse congregation, Brown's Word of Life Church can't be confused with some of the racist groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate list.

But Tom Brown Ministries, which is part of the church, was listed as one of 26 anti-gay hate groups in the U.S. and one of two in Texas. The other is the Bethesda Christian Institute in San Antonio.

The other regional group on the hate list is Aggressive Christianity of Berino, N.M., which is listed as an anti-Muslim group.

An El Paso chapter of the Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan appeared on the hate list in 2008, but it quickly disappeared.

Byrd said Tom Brown Ministries deserves its spot on the Southern Poverty Law Center list.

"I think they absolutely did the right thing," she said.

She described how, as the domestic-partners debate wore on, members of Brown's group appeared before the City Council.

"Week after week after week, they did really harmful, ugly gay bashing," she said.

She said Brown tried to peddle bogus statistics saying that gays are more likely to be pedophiles and rapists and that he would accept them just as he would thieves and murderers.

Byrd also said by using such expressions as "family values" to discriminate against gays, Brown and others are implying that gays have an agenda to destroy the family.

In interviews, Brown has said that homosexuality is something people are driven to by external forces and that in almost all cases can be cured.

The American Psychiatric Association disagrees with that, however, and has said such "cures" can be harmful.

But Brown said that he's being "demonized" for standing for morality and that he'll leave it to local people to decide whether his church is a hate group.

"I think El Pasoans know me better than someone from out of town," he said.

Marty Schladen may be reached at mschladen@elpasotimes.com; 546-6127.

Information

For more information: go to splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/anti-gay/ active_hate_groups

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